Where to post remote jobs for developers for free

6nomads
6 min readFeb 2, 2021

You need a developer, and the first thing you do is you go on a job board. You pay from around $100 to $400 to make your job listing visible to candidates for about a month. In Europe the pricing is even higher than in the US with some job boards charging $1,000! That is only for a single post and an opportunity to scroll through hundreds of random resumes that will make you question the whole job board industry and the sanity of the world. Even though job boards are still useful to some degree as they traditionally attract a lot of traffic, we believe they should not be the main focus of your recruitment effort.

Our goal at 6nomads is to help companies streamline their recruitment process and find the best developers in the whole world who will match their needs and will fit in the remote culture. We decided to create a comprehensive list of free online job posting opportunities to hire developers. These resources will enable you to at least cut down on costs, and we are always here for you to save your time, money and energy.

1. Join Slack

With more than 12 million people in 150+ countries using Slack every day, it is definitely worth exploring. Slack is made for online workplace communication and fits perfectly into remote culture. An increasing number of new channels which are what forums were 30 years ago makes Slack a powerful recruitment tool.

Register on Slack and…

  1. Find professional communities.
  2. Read the rules of the community.
  3. Choose a channel appropriate for posting a job in a list to the left of your screen, such as #jobs, #career, #hiring, or even something more exotic like #feeding-the-family that the Slack Java specialists community has.

Trawling through hundreds of themed groups on Slack is exhausting, however, there are a few searchable directories available such as:

  • Slofile programming and tech categories
  • Standuply where 2000 chat groups are listed
  • Techbeacon featuring 46 Slack groups for developers
  • Toggl list with 109 Slack communities for sourcing mostly for IT roles

2. Explore Discord

Discord was designed to serve the gaming community and has become one of the most popular tools for developers of any kind. You can either try built-in search to find communities or use one of the well-structured lists below:

  • GitHub awesome lists feature general communities for developers and ones dedicated to a particular topic or language.
  • Discord.me is a public Discord server directory perfect for finding new communities. The servers there are divided into different categories aka tags with ‘programming’ being the most relevant for hiring developers. You can log in there using your Discord account to make joining servers more convenient.
  • Disboard is pretty similar to Discord.me. To find servers for job postings try different tags, i.e. ‘programming’, ‘coding’, ‘tech”, and rank the list by member count.
  • Top.gg is another place where you can look for Discord servers and rank them based on the number of members.

3. Don’t delete your Facebook account just yet

Facebook is a go-to resource for recruiters to share remote job openings. On Facebook, you can create a separate page for your business or maybe even your company’s career page to post job updates or links to the job listings on your website for free.

Facebook groups are perfect for getting free candidate leads. Join relevant groups, such as:

Keep in mind that some admins only let you join their groups with your personal account.

4. Become a Redditor

Reddit is the 17th most popular website in the world, where people meet, chat, argue, become friends, fall in love and find employees. Even though half of its users are based in the US, it doesn’t hurt to explore it as a tool for international remote hiring.

Check the following subreddits:

  • r/forhire with more than 200k members is the most popular thread for posting jobs on Reddit.
  • r/hiring has 10k Members and made specifically for job listings.
  • r/jobbit might be the best option as its main focus is on programming.
  • r/gameDevClassifieds is created for posting jobs in the game industry.

Reddit’s communities of developers are obviously more efficient to target the right audience. Look for subreddits relevant to the specific job opening you are trying to fill. One of the most comprehensive lists of specific programming language Reddit communities can be found here.

Some subreddits have a job thread where companies looking for relevant programming skills can post their jobs. For example, monthly job threads are hosted by the Scala subreddit and the Clojure one.

If you see that the subreddit doesn’t have a job thread, reach out to the admin and ask if they could post the position in the general thread or consider creating a job-specific one. Admins do like those who respect the rules.

There are also a few smaller subreddits dedicated to remote jobs and specific skills such as:

5. Get featured in ‘Who is hiring?’ By Hacker News

Hacker News (HN) was initially created by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham and is still run by his investment fund and YC. HN looks a lot like Reddit with a focus on computer science, tech and startups.

There is a monthly thread for programming jobs called Ask HN: Who is Hiring? where a user can submit information on a vacancy in their project or company. A few indexes and websites are based on the data from HN Who is hiring thread, such as Whoishiring.me, Hnhiring.com and the directory curated by Remoteleaf.

6. Try Telegram

Telegram has more than half a billion users all over the world. It is not widely used in English-speaking countries, so be prepared to see a lot of content in other languages, from Russian to Persian. Promising developers use Telegram to find jobs with the help of our bot or occasionally browsing professional channels and chats.

Here are a few channels in English where employers and developers meet:

Telegram is widely popular among Russian-speaking internet users, and there is a good chance to find great candidates among them. Check Telegram channels in Russian and use @YTranslateBot to get an idea of what is going on there:

7. Shift to asynchr

If you want to hire a high-skilled developer for a remote role, forget about time zones. In our face-paced world, real-time interviews and live technical assessments are more of a luxury than a necessity.

Asynchr is a tool that helps distributed companies automate the process of asynchronous hiring. It is an all-in-one solution that combines sourcing candidates through online professional communities and personalized candidate outreach, asynchronous video interviewing and candidate tracking. A job posting on asynchr.com is just a short video where you introduce yourself, your company and describe the position you are hiring a developer for.

Apply for the private beta to use the service for free and among the first.

8. Hard to find and easy to lose: a bonus list of free job boards!

Read also:
The Complex​ Guide to Remote Work: Part 1. Communication
The Ultimate FAQ About 6nomads Talent Review Process
Why Do European Developers Choose to Work Remotely for Israeli Companies?

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6nomads

6nomads.com — a new kind of recruitment service focusing on remote tech companies.